Human Resources

Franck is studying business in Paris. He goes home for a summer internship at the factory where his father has worked for thirty years, and starts in human resources. Management is negotiating with the union over the move to a thirty five hour week. Franck, in good faith, designs a questionnaire, and the questionnaire turns into a redundancy plan. His father is on the list. Laurent Cantet directs, in his first feature. Jalil Lespert plays Franck. The rest of the cast are not professional actors. The workers, union men and managers were cast from their real equivalents, and the man playing Franck's father had worked in a factory. That choice sets the film's language: the meeting scenes do not look performed. Cantet refuses to reduce this to bosses against workers. The real conflict is between a boy changing class and his father, and the hardest line Franck throws at him is that he has spent his whole life submitting. The film won the César for best first work, and Lespert took most promising actor. Who it is for: viewers who want workplace drama, the question of class, and French social realism. Who it is not for: it takes place almost entirely in meeting rooms and factory corridors. For plot, it is very dry.